MASTER CRAFT GROUP Sdn Bhd

On the court record

Illustrates the position of a successful adjudication claimant defending its decision against a set-aside challenge while pursuing enforcement of the sum awarded.

Master Craft Group Sdn Bhd appears in the reported judgments as a construction company at the centre of connected adjudication proceedings under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, litigated in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi). Its dispute with a counterparty contractor generated parallel applications to set aside and to enforce a single adjudication decision, heard together, in which the company was the successful claimant in the underlying adjudication.

The challenge to the adjudication decision, brought by the paying party, rested on two principal grounds: that the adjudicator had failed to act impartially and independently, and that the adjudicator had acted in excess of jurisdiction in arriving at the conclusion of the adjudication proceedings. Those are among the recognised grounds for setting aside under section 15 of the 2012 Act, directed at the integrity and jurisdictional limits of the fast-track process rather than at the correctness of the outcome.

The court's reasoning, as recorded, was that the paying party had failed to establish the ground under section 15(b) of the 2012 Act, and that there was no ambiguity in relation to the due dates of the payments claimed by the company — the paying party not having denied that, at the time the payment claim was issued, all the payment invoices were already due for payment. That conclusion protects the interim-binding character of an adjudication decision, under which such a decision is not lightly set aside and a bare allegation of bias or excess of jurisdiction must be made out on proper grounds. The parallel enforcement proceeding reflects the pay-now-argue-later policy of the Act, under which an adjudicated sum is ordinarily enforced as an order of the court. Across the matters, the company illustrates the position of a successful adjudication claimant defending its decision against a set-aside challenge while pursuing enforcement of the sum awarded.